AITKEN AGAINST STREET NAME CHANGES

THE leader of Glasgow City Council has responded to calls for streets named after people with links to the slave trade to be changed.

Susan Aitken said that while she had been supportive of the move in the past, further education on the issue had led her to the conclusion that it could result in the “erasure of Black history”.

Ivan McKee, Glasgow Provan MSP and Scottish Government minister for trade, sparked debate by calling for street names including Buchanan, Cochrane and Dunlop to be dropped.

Petitions followed as Black Lives Matter movements have seen rising support.

McKee also suggested the city could rename a street for George Floyd.

Activists have since placed alternative names below the plaques of some of Glasgow’s streets, including Buchanan Street and Cochrane Street, suggesting they be changed to George Floyd Street and Sheku Bayoh Street respectively.

Aitken said that campaigners such as Professor Emeritus Sir Geoff Palmer and anti-racist organisation CRER led her to believe that we cannot erase this part of history.

She added: “That is why Glasgow City Council is funding research to give us deeper understanding and response.”

Sir Palmer agreed with the councillor’s statement and added: “Remove the evidence... remove the deed. Plaques are essential.”

We reported earlier this week that CRER campaigners fear that we “already have a problem with amnesia on Scotland’s role in slavery”.

Instead of simply replacing the names, it said more should be done to inform and educate people about the individuals in question.

One of the city’s most famous streets, Buchanan Street, is named after Andrew Buchanan

– a tobacco trader and whose family owned slave plantations in Virginia.

The two main streets running from the city centre to the River Clyde also have a dark slave past.

Oswald Street is named after James Oswald, who was not only a plantation owner in America and the Caribbean but a trader of slaves in West Africa.

Jamaica Street celebrates the trade in rum and sugar from the Caribbean but is also where many merchants owned plantations worked by generations of slaves.

McKee said: “It could be we change some of the street names, we could keep some like Virginia Street, Jamaica Street, to remember where slaves were taken to.”

However, he suggested Glasgow could rename Glassford Street, Ingram Street and others.

He said it would “raise the issue and get a debate going around it”.

For those names that remain he suggested plaques to explain the full nature of their namesakes’ exploits.

The government minister said Glasgow has previously changed street names to highlight an issue, citing Nelson Mandela Place.